Author: Srdjan Vukčević, Blue Coach – founder and CEO

AmCham member Blue Coach is known as the pioneer of the executive coaching industry in Montenegro and the Adriatic – SEE region. For the past 11 years, they have been working with executives, business owners, and their teams to measurably/significantly improve their leadership and organizational effectiveness.
Blue Coach continues to emphasize the importance of effective leadership. Since this has been such a hot topic, it has also generated a lot of questions from those within their network and beyond. To address these inquiries, Srdjan Vukcevic, the Executive coach, certified Hogan consultant and CEO of Blue Coach developed the following FAQ.

How we can define an effective leader?

Leadership is the ability to build an effective team. A good leader must be someone others are willing to follow. Four essential characteristics of effective leaders are: integrity, judgment, competence, and vision.
What is less known is that humility – as opposed to confidence, charm, and charisma – is characteristic of the most effective leaders. Also, people with low self-confidence tend to be their greatest critics. However, when this quality runs with ambition, it drives individuals to evaluate their weaknesses and work hard to become better.

Very often the humble leader is perceived as a weak leader. When is this true, and when is this wrong?
Identifying humility with weakness is always wrong. Humble leaders are those who eat feedback for a breakfast, admit negative emotions, constructively transform fear and criticism, develop realistic goals, develop support systems, and reward themselves for their achievements on their way.
Although it may seem easier to turn off and negate information from others regarding our behaviour, we should know that the first step in self – development, and progress, is facing our strengths, weaknesses and drivers.

How would an ineffective leader look like?

An ineffective managers and leaders are the primary cause of stress, absence, and turnover of employees. Every employee can say that he/she spent a lot of time working for an intolerable boss.
Ineffective managers and leaders create significant, unnecessary financial problems for the organization.
It is important to point that primary reason why managers and leaders fail is the inability to build effective teams, while the reason why managers are unable to build teams is concerned with the way they treat employees.

Can some negative features of the manager and business owner destroy the company?

Absolutely, troubles arise when leaders lean too heavily on charismatic or aggressive personality traits. Thus, narcissism of executives and business owners can lead to enormous financial losses, thus to the distraction of the company.
From a psychological point of view, leadership is primarily a process of influence, but there is no real benefit for followers who are strongly influenced by someone whose reasoning is poor. So, when leaders are charismatic and narcissistic with the lack of good reasoning, vision or abilities to build effective teams, they can be very destructive.
Therefore, competence should take precedence over charisma, narcissism, and inflationary look upon oneself. It would be better for all of us to have the leaders choose based on what they know they do, instead of what they are saying they know to do.

Is charisma an obstacle to effective leadership?

It is not. The charisma that is used with care about employees and for empowering them to fulfil their vision is certainly valuable in effective leadership. By contrast, some charismatic leaders are exploitative towards followers and resort to authoritative means for carrying out their vision.

How to become an Effective Leader?

Start with the data. It is unlikely that powerful executives will seek or receive honest feedback, but personal assessments can provide them with objective, scientifically valid information on their strengths, weaknesses and how others see them.
Quality reports of personality test, such as Hogan Lead, provide powerful information on the strengths, weaknesses, and reputation of a person. However, without the effective developmental framework, it is difficult to convert this information into measurable progress. In that case, a coach can provide the feedback and suggestions necessary for the leader to create such a framework.
It is important to emphasize that self-consciousness does not immune leaders from making mistakes. At some point in his/her career, everybody makes a wrong move or has an emotional outburst. However, possessing objective information on our strengths and weaknesses can help us to better endure stress, pressure, isolation, and loneliness of the leader’s position, and to ensure that even when the dark side of our personality appears, it does not destroy our career.